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FIRE AND FURY

FIRE AND FURY

Calling Bluff at the Table

I’ve never been a good poker player lacking the special skills of bluffing, decoying and raising. We know that Kim Jong Un has made a pretty big move in his missile and nuclear program. Yesterday (8-8-2017) Trump raised the stakes with a war of words.

With this quote, Donald Trump seems to be putting on a squeeze and going all in, “North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire, fury and frankly power the likes of which this world has never seen before.”

It’s amazing to me that so many so-called “experts” on TV the day after (8-9-2017) Trump bombastic words were sprayed at North Korea, said that he wasn’t really sending a message to Kim Jong Un. Some claim he was endeavoring to shake the Chinese leaders out of their passive restraint of North Korea. Really?

One of the things we have covered on this site has been the negatives of being unpredictable and uncertain. Trump’s use of the term “fire and fury” was interpreted by most military people to mean nuclear war. You cannot drop an atomic bomb as a warning shot. We hope the Donald understands that.

After our President made such a harsh statement, North Korea didn’t wait too long to get its propaganda TV news team to blast a message back at Trump that they are seriously considering a strike against the island of Guam.

This island was selected as a strategic target. For one, most Americans don’t realize that since the Spanish-American War, Guam has been a territory of the United States. People born in Guam are automatically US citizens and our Andersen Air Force Base not only played a major role in the Vietnam War, but it is where the fighters come from that we’ve been using to “intimidate” Kim. To say you are thinking about attacking Guam is saying you will attack the United States.

The day after the Donald’s, arm-folded (defensive posture), “F & F” announcement, our great Orange Leader’s rhetoric was toned down on Twitter today (8-9-2017), “My first order as President was to renovate and modernize our nuclear arsenal. It is now far stronger and more powerful than ever before. Hopefully we will never have to use this power, but there will never be a time that we are not the most powerful nation in the world!”

While the President was trying to temper his own words, his Secretary of State returning to the mainland said that he doesn’t believe there is “any imminent threat” and added, “Americans should sleep well at night.” Unless he has plans to get Trump out of office, his request that I sleep well at night will have no effect. In a strange plot twist, the use of Tweeter was the more mature approach this time. We didn’t quite get teleprompter Trump, but the Twitter Trump was much calmer than Impromptu Trump.

The irony of this new crisis is that Trump was told by Obama before he left that this would be the new President’s most difficult challenge. And as someone mentioned on a talk-show last night, the days of a President, like Obama, doing nothing about the problem, sure seems now like a more reasonable approach. You see, there is quite a bit of history on how countries get nuclear power and then eventually atomic weapons. They just do it. When someone has the capability of using nuclear arsenal, you really don’t have much to say about it. It’s like an international 2nd Amendment.

What Trump is playing with, is not the lives of thousands of Americans who are live in South Korea, but the 25 million Koreans in Seoul, the capital. When approaching a madman with an atomic bomb, you probably shouldn’t act like a madman.

As I have stated before, if you look at Pakistan, with 140 nuclear bombs and their neighbor, India with 130 devices, you can see that a stalemate in the bomb business is all you can wish for. Once India got the A-bomb, Pakistan had to get their own collection. And the world stood by and watched them do it. How could you protest a country trying to defend itself?

North Korea, short of China and Russian moving troops and armament to the northern most border of Kim Jong Un’s domain, will get an atomic bomb. In fact, they already have one. They have never stopped aiming toward that goal. When you are a dictator, you usually do whatever you want. So, what is this all about?

Does this mean that South Korea will need to have 50, then 100, then 150 nukes just to keep up with the Un? We can send the whole U.S. Pacific Fleet to the waters around North Korea and wait. But what will we be waiting for? Trump, once again, is using the bully pulpit the wrong way. If the strategy is bad cop, good cop, with Tillerson playing the good cop, the international ramifications of the rhetoric gives this President the reputation of being all over the place. And sad to say, a person who appears to be unhinged.

The process of leading a great nation like the United States has never been easy. But this time, the tough businessman has met his match. And we all hope and pray that the Orange wannabe General doesn’t do the wrong thing. War courts are the wrong place to brag about how successful you were in an election.